Earlier this week, TensorX raised €8 million in a seed funding round, which its founder Shane Morton described as a ‘first step’ before a bigger build.
Irish AI infrastructure company TensorX is to partner with finance provider Solstice in a partnership to deliver a European AI infrastructure worth up to €1bn.
The companies said they will “work together to create a center … for financing AI hardware and data center construction to meet the growing demand for autonomous computing across the EU”.
Dublin-based TensorX buys and deploys AI hardware and data center capacity across the EU, with the aim of connecting its start-up and enterprise clients to personal computing and storing “information and data in a European infrastructure with complete data persistence and zero storage”.
Solstice is described as “an on-chain settlement and protocol and part of the Deus X Capital ecosystem”.
“Europe wants an AI that can work on its own terms, on its own soil, without giving its data to someone else’s cloud in the world,” said Tim Grant, chairman of TensorX.
“Meeting that immediate demand takes hardware, and much more. Billions of dollars toward GPUs and data center capacity is the first step, and we expect to continue to buy as demand grows. Solstice gives us a partner with the resources to keep pace with this incredibly fast-moving market.”
Relatedly, Solstice will launch a production asset called ‘aiUSX’ to help companies fund AI development using cash they already have.
“Every company is becoming an AI company, and every one of them is watching their money go up,” said Ben Nadareski, CEO of Solstice.
“aiUSX is putting the money they have set aside to make AI work for now. They are accessing the kind of AI infrastructure loans that used to be with big institutions, the capital is always liquid, and what they get is going to understand later.”
Earlier this week, TensorX raised 8 million euros in a seed funding round with the aim of further contributing to European initiatives for autonomous AI infrastructure, which its founder Shane Morton described as a “first step” before a larger build.
The EU is concerned about regulating US technology companies that use the bloc’s technology and data infrastructure.
“European companies don’t want to make a political statement about the bulk of their AI. They want to make a virtual one,” Grant said earlier this week. “Their data should stay in Europe, in an infrastructure they can trust, under the rules they need to abide by.”
Data from Accenture suggests that 62pc of European organizations want AI to dominate, while 75pc of European businesses plan to shift the burden of AI to local providers by 2030, according to Gartner.
“Sovereign AI is one of the biggest infrastructure builds of the decade, and it’s spending as much money as it is working on chips,” said Stuart Connolly of Deus X Capital.
“TensorX builds the computer, Solstice brings funding and aiUSX allows more companies to participate in funding.”
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